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Mayor Rob Ford has so many things to give up — shamelessness, food (his mother says), vodka, crack cocaine, bad influences, public urination, rage fits, racist remarks, hijacking Remembrance Day to get a little Allied-war-effort gloss on himself — I’ll stop here as the list has derailed the column before it began. The thing lies at the side of the tracks panting for specificity but today we are going to get philosophical.

Doug Ford has said that Wednesday’s council debate on censuring the awful Ford will be a public “flogging,” a “beating,” a “butchering.” Not at all. It will not be corporeal but theoretical. City councillors will object not to Ford himself as much as the idea of a Ford-like man having become mayor of a Canadian city in the first place. How did this happen? Take a fetal position.

You know that Ford will not give up his pile of velveteen-rabbit bad habits, and neither will I give up mine and neither will most of us. We hear so much chirpy American babble about healing, about our demons, post-traumatic stress disorder and rehab, but it’s hard to escape the deep drag of our North American natures, which is to indulge.

I do not object to pleasure, having been grimacing for weeks at the attacks on Miley Cyrus naked beneath her clothes, the subtext being the deplorable sexual hunger of confoundingly attractive young people.

I like pleasure. For instance, I’d love to start smoking, a nice destructive habit with long-term consequences, an addiction that takes me only to the railyards of human behaviour, not the Marianas Trench.

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But smoking and drinking are twins. Whenever I contemplate lighting up, I see oddly thin people smoking on the sidewalk, their faces desperate, their bones so distorted by alcoholism that they walk like wishbones. They’re not going to stop now.

Humans like to get a break from themselves. I get that. If I had voted for Ford, if I had lined up at Old City Hall Tuesday to have the man personally hand me an autographed Bobblehead doll of himself and a magnet (FYI, I am told the magnet attaches to domestic metal objects — guns, pedometers, purse grommets — while the doll goes right under the pillow) I would head to a bar straight after.

There is one just east of City Hall, on James Street. I know because my husband spends half an hour trying to park outside it — it never works out — while I shop at the Bay on Queen to meet my needs, which apparently are patio umbrellas and cheese boards.

Why, you ask. Because children expect this. Children are conservative. They don’t want a house that smells like Benson and Hedges, they want boring respectable parents. There is still a basic skeletal structure to Canadian life that involves cleanliness, courtesy, good nutrition and setting a good example for your kids, who will play in a lingerie football league over your dead body.

You try for Most Boring Parent, a contest you never wished to enter but still aim to win.

This means that you give things up. What council wants is so minimal, a mayor who has social skills, who doesn’t swerve from the norm. On Take Your Kids to Work Day, you can send your children to this mayor’s office without fear that they’ll meet Sandro Lisi or find something that fell out of the mayor’s pocket.

If council wants to build fences for this mayor, they are fences in the air only. He may wish to rip a person’s throat out but he cannot say it out loud. He can drink but must never be drunk. He doesn’t have to be able to add but he needs to hire staff who can. When the Star studies Ford’s wild claims of massive money-saving and proves they’re a lie, he has to come up with accurate numbers in response. It is basic stuff.

Council doesn’t have anything against Ford himself. What they despise is his everlasting maddening Fording. It must cease. It will not. He can’t stop.

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